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Being human makes for foolishness.Cameron M. SmithVolume 37.6, November/December 2013Our difficulty accepting evolution isn’t just because some religions oppose it or that it is complicated—it isn’t.…Continue

I have been watching Cartoon Network lately. Mainly because adult TV has gotten really boring, but I also still love cartoons. One day I was watching this one show called "The World of Gumball" and…Continue

Children’s book too hot for U.S. publishers warmly received in Canada

VICTORIA—From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

Published Tuesday, Sep. 13, 2011 8:18PM EDT

Last updated Wednesday, Sep. 14, 2011 9:13AM EDT

Daniel Loxton, an illustrator and writer, created a children’s book so outrageous, so outlandish, so controversial no American publisher dared touch it.

It does not depict nudity. It does not contain curse words. It does not include blasphemy. The love scenes, such as they are, involve males with females.

It does include a straightforward explanation for the complexity of the natural world through a simple scientific theory.

“So many of the publishing professionals I was talking to were leery,” he said.

“When push came to shove they declined to publish the book. Several did indicate to me it was too hot a topic.”

The book wound up being published by Canadian-owned Kids Can Press, which also expected objections from creationists.

So far, the book, Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be, an illustrated primer written for readers in Grades 3 to 7, has generated more prize nominations than controversy.

Evolution is one of three young-reader finalists in the Lane Anderson Award for Canadian science books. The other finalists for the $10,000 prize, to be awarded Wednesday, are Ultimate Trains by Peter McMahon of Ontario, and The Sea Wolves by the British Columbia team of Ian McAllister, a photographer, and Nicholas Read, a writer.

Read the rest here. I cannot believe that no US publisher would publish this book!!!

EVOLUTION RIGHT UNDER OUR NOSES

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Dr. Munshi-South has joined the ranks of a small but growing number of field biologists who study urban evolution — not the rise and fall of skyscrapers and neighborhoods, but the biological changes that cities bring to the wildlife that inhabits them. For these scientists, the New York metropolitan region is one great laboratory.

White-footed mice, stranded on isolated urban islands, are evolving to adapt to urban stress. Fish in the Hudson have evolved to cope with poisons in the water. Native ants find refuge in the median strips on Broadway. And more familiar urban organisms, like bedbugs, rats and bacteria, also mutate and change in response to the pressures of the metropolis. In short, the process of evolution is responding to New York and other cities the way it has responded to countless environmental changes over the past few billion years. Life adapts. The mice are the object of Dr. Munshi-South’s attention. Since 2008, he and his colleagues have fanned out across the city to study how the rise of New York influenced the evolution of the deer mice.

How some can look at the complexities of nature and say there is not an intelligent designer is baffling to me.

Did the bees and flowers get together and decide to both evolve so that they could help each other out not now but in millions of years from that time? What about the time frame? If it takes millions of years for a change then if the change was necessary the species would die out before the change was accomplished. No change was needed for survival because they survived for millions of generations before any change could be noticed. When people say everything we see was created by pure chance I really do question their intelligence and/or their ability to think logically.

When we find an arrow head we can see that something created it. The chances of an arrow head being created by some rocks falling down a cliff and hitting each other just right are just astronomical so we assume that it was created by man an intelligent designer. At the same time we look at the universe, the human body and the incredibly ways plants and animals interact and the "intelligent" say it just happened. Which of these two would be more likely to believe that they happened by chance? The rock falling off a cliff and on the way down it just so happens that the several times it hits another rock everything is aligned just right and an arrow head shaped rock lands at the bottom of a cliff. Or is there more of a chance that the human body is created by pure chance? If we look at this logically and someone says it is impossible for a rock to be shaped like an arrow head by pure natural forces and chance but yet all of creation must have been created by chance we have to look at them and conclude they are wrong.